Where pop culture and the social sciences COLLIDE! A satirical(?) blog analyzing mass media trends and a place to get all psychosocial about consumerism...even if you DON'T think the Internet is a principality of the US.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Marvel can do no wrong. Every time I think they’ve thrown out an idea for a movie that’s too out there – a high-concept adaptation that I assume is just too kooky for mainstream tastes – the exact opposite is proven to be the case. I was convinced, convinced I say, that Guardians of the Galaxy was going to be that breaking point. A movie about a retarded tree voiced by Vin Diesel and a damn raccoon with a laser gun, featuring Dave Bautista in a major speaking role as an autistic Kratos? Not only was something so bizarre destined to derail the Marvel money-making movie machine, it had to be a Heaven’s Gate-type genre killer.

Instead, it grossed almost $800 million at the box office and created an entirely new, ensemble-driven merchandising cash cow for Disney.

But surely, Ant-Man has to be a colossal flop, right? A C-level (at best) character, the original director walked off the movie, and T.I. was probably the biggest name involved in the entire production – it just had to flop hard, right? Well, it wound up being one of the most critically acclaimed movies of summer 2015 and only made Marvel a cool half-billion dollars in ticket sales.

But Deadpool – a hyper-violent, bawdy R-rated superhero spoof directed by a guy who used to direct video game cutscenes, that couldn’t be propped up by the Disney-Marvel-Star Wars Industrial Complex’s mass merchandising Wehrmacht, released in the middle of winter? Oh yeah, this one HAS to be a dud. We’re talking Titan A.E, The Adventures of Pluto Nash level-disasters here.

Fast forward three months later, though, and The Merc with the Mouth’s second big studio movie has grossed in excess of $750 million and become the highest gross R-rated movie ever. At this point, I am now wholeheartedly convinced that Stan Lee could take a shit in a can, focus a camera on it and release it on IMAX and it would still make $100 million on opening weekend guaranteed.

I know this is a late review. Here we are, on the verge of Cinco de Mayo and I’m just now getting around to watching a movie released on Valentine’s Day. Don’t blame me though – it too me a while to find a full version of the movie online on Youtube … I mean, for the film to make its way to the local dollar theater, of course.

Before we get into a critical analysis of the flick, I’d like to state the while I am familiar with the character, I haven’t actually read any Deadpool comics since the late 1990s. Maybe they’ve retooled and retconned and rewritten the character extensively since then, but from what I recollect, he was a guy with a really messed up face who made lots of stupid puns and excessively broke the fourth wall. On that level, at least, this cinematic interpretation of Deadpool feels pretty authentic. With his nasally, Chael Sonnen-like inflection, Ryan Reynolds is actually pretty freakin' fantastic as the titular character, who totally comes off as that smug, perpetual frat-boy you envy for all the poon he gets even though he lives in squalor and can’t hold down a steady job to save his life.

For the most part, Deadpool is pretty good. Not great, mind you, but certainly more entertaining than something like, say, Days of Future Past or Age of Ultron. While it’s not riotously funny, it never really loses its momentum, either, and Reynolds' rapid fire smart-assery goes a long way in preventing th film from falling into the typical superhero movie doldrums.

As far as the plot for Deadpool is concerned, it’s fundamentally your straight-forward “vengeance is mine” chestnut. Stricken with terminal cancer out of the blue one day (just a few weeks after he tried to commemorate Halloween by eating out his significant other while wearing Dracula teeth, in case you needed the specifics), wise-cracking hired goon Wade Wilson decides to volunteer for some sort of mysterious mutant gene harvesting experimenting (in case you weren’t in the know, the film takes place in the same cinematic universe as the X-flicks, even though just two X-people ever show up in the picture – a peculiarity the main character hangs a lampshade on in what is probably the funniest moment in the entire movie.) So, yeah, he winds up getting regenerative healing powers a’la a certain franchise cash cow (let’s just say his name rhymes with “Polverine”) and is essentially cured of cancer, but at the sake of having his face melted into a craggy, Freddy Krueger-like visage. This forces him to leave his longtime girlfriend behind (cue the “how could she ever love a monster like me?" trope) and undertake a series of odd (hit) jobs en route to a fatal showdown with the man responsible for turning his mug into something resembling a sunburned frankfurter.

There are some great gags throughout the movie. The opening credits sequence – a pastiche of the done-to-death bullet-time intros set to the tune of Juice Newton’s “Angel of the Morning” and featuring a plethora of in-jokes (such as a Starbucks cup with Rob Liefield’s name on it and a photo from 2011’s ill-fated Green Lantern movie) while the actors and producers are introduced as “douche bags” and “moody teenagers” - gets the self-reflexive LOLs rolling early. The fourth-wall shattering humor is constant, culminating with one of the better post-end-credits stingers in recent memory (which serves as both a fond homage to Ferris Bueller and a sly jab at another Rob Liefeld co-creation - by the way, does anyone know if Dolph Lundgren's phone is still connected?)

From there, there are plenty of potshots at Fox’s X-Menmovie megalith – at one point, the film’s anti-hero protagonist refers to The Xavier School for Gifted Children as “The Neverland Ranch” – and there are several fairly funny sight gags that also double as kinda-sorta exposition on the character’s background (be forewarned, however, this does include pegging as a pivotal plot point.) I really love how Deadpool was paired with two of the most random mutants in the Marvel-verse – a cereal-munching, C.G.I. Colossus who sounds like he is voiced by Yakov Smirnoff and, of all characters, the brooding, embossed-cover-era creation Negasonic Teenage Warhead – and the interaction between the three is definitely a hoot. How rare it is to find a comic-book-derived film where the dialogueexchanges, and not the cataclysmic multi-million dollar special effect laden "Apocalypse Porn" finale, is the true highlight.

While Reynolds' nonstop quips and obscure references certainly keep the film engrossing (for god's sake, a fuckin' WHAM album serves as something of a Chekov's gun), Deadpool ironically hits its biggest snags when it tries to snake its away around the typical superhero movie tropes. The flashbacks to Wade Wilson’s pre-super powers days are pretty mundane, and the whole Weapon X recruitment stuff drags on for far too long. The film’s central villain – a generic British guy whose superpower is that he can’t feel pain – is really bland and the rest of the antagonists, save Gina Carano’s super-strong super-villainess, are hardly anything more than cannon fodder. The rest of the supporting cast – most notably Deadpool's bartending best pal and his blind, elderly roomie – are totally unremarkable.

Furthermore, the love story dynamic (yes, there actually is a “romantic” subplot running throughout the film) just feels artificial and forced, and the big junkyard donnybrook climax leaves much to be desired. Alas, although the film stumbles here and there, it’s definitely a more enjoyable film than the all-too-predictable, by-the-numbers MCU or DCU outings that have been shat out as of late, and it’s a refreshing (or, as some may see it, revolting) change of pace to see such wanton carnage, nonstop profanity and coarse double-entendres in a genre that, with the exception of The Watchmenand a whole bunch of indie adaptations, has remained in a state of arrested development since the first Christopher Reeves Super-flick came out. That, and it is a hoot to see Stan Lee making a cameo as a strip club DJ, in a scene that I am pretty sure features more bare breasts than just about any comic-based film since Heavy Metal.

Not everything Deadpoolattempts works, but it’s just different enough to keep you tuned in regardless. While it’s far from being a stellar, adult-oriented genre-satire a’la 2015’s outstanding Kingsman, it’s nonetheless a better than averageoffering compared to your regular House of Mouse or Time Warner funny book adaptation, and hopefully, its surprising box office success opens the floodgates for more considerably less juvenile comic book movies to come down the pipes in the upcoming years (oh,you know you want you some hard-RLoboin your future. You know you do.)

So yes, Deadpoolis pretty much everything you expect it to be and absolutely nothing you wouldn’t –and at the end of the day, that really can't be considered a bad thing whatsoever.

And folks, you need to stop whatever you are doing and watch it RIGHT NOW. I am dead serious - click out of this article, pull up the Netflix app and start viewing Look Who's Back. Whatever shit you've got going on for the next two hours can wait. You can always feed your kids later or finish that spreadsheet at work tomorrow, but soaking up arguably the greatest work of pure social satire in at least two decades is something you simply cannot procrastinate about.

When most people use the term "social satire," they usually mean Horation satires - that being, tongue-in-cheek, on-the-nose comedic works a'la the stuff Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce wrote. What is considered contemporary social satire - your South Parks, your Daily Shows, your endless array of regressivley worse Sacha Baron Cohen movies, etc. - however, is really more akin to the Juvenlian form of satire, in which the point isn't to address the inherent folly of man through self-deprecating, introspective humor but to crucify your political rivals through scorn and mockery. While the film certainly has a pointed political message, Look Who's Back is one of the few satirical works in ANY medium over the last 25 years that can rightly be considered a classical Horation composition. The objective of the film isn't to espouse its own ideology as the "supreme" one or to paint opposing schools of thoughts as wrongheaded, prejudiced or downright malevolent. Rather, it is a film keenly aware of the peculiarities of the times, a way-ahead-of-the-curve comedy that almost feels like a work 20 years into the future reflecting on our modern way of life as that lamentable point in time and space where everything went wrong. This isn't a self-blinded comedy utterly infatuated with its own temporality as are modern Hollywood comedies like The Boss or Neighbors 2 or even Zootopia and Deadpool. Instead, this is an indelibly percipient movie that KNOWS everybody in German society is playing an active part in its inevitable decline; indeed, it might just be the most supraliminal German work since the heyday of the silent era expressionists, whose dreary, phatasmagoric films seemed to almost metaphysically portend the arrival of the Third Reich decades in advance.

The premise of Look Who's Backis, at heart, your standard “fish out of water” yarn. Through some unexplained supernatural phenomena, Die Fuhrer is somehow transported to Berlin, circa 2014, right on top of the bunker where he would've offed himself in 1945. After being awakened by some kids playing soccer in the ghettos, the most famous, mustachioed Austrian of all-time is taken in by a newsstand operator, who believes old A.H. is just a really, really dedicated performance artist. Meanwhile, our time-displaced dictator laments the current state of German affairs, bemoaning Angela Merkel, expressing his solidarity with, of all factions, Germany’s green political party (environmentalism, he says, is a strictly Aryan conceptualization) and enjoying that mass-produced wonder of 21st century foodstuffs, individually-wrapped granola bars.

From there, we’re introduced to the film’s secondary character, a down-on-his-luck freelance reporter in dire need of a big story to salvage his stagnating career. Eventually, he runs into ‘dolf at the newsstand and presumeshe’s just some sort of post-post-modern comedian. Hopping in his mom’s van, the sad-sack journalist takes the temporally transplanted totalitarian on a tour of contemporary Germany, along the way quizzing him on his thoughts on modern society.

At this point in the film, the movie takes on a sort of Borat/Bruno vibe, largely focusing on the reactions of real Germans to the reemergence of Hitler - who, fittingly enough, resumes his painting pastime as a town square caricaturist. He then meets up with several real Germans who are not only A-OK posing for selfies with him, but venting about all of those “Salafists” coming into the country and screwing everything up for everybody. He also rendezvouses with a few members of the National Democratic Party of Germany, but he isn’t too impressed by what he sees. “They think they can start the Fourth Reich,” he says, “when they can’t even put together a shelf from IKEA.”

After photos and videos go viral online, the reporter pitches the “faux Fuhrer” to one of Germany’s biggest television networks, and they agree to put Hitler on the air as a special guest on a lowbrow variety program (whose writers expect him to run down a list of anti-Semitic jokes they penned for him). In the interim, Hitler exalts the network’s constantly vaping head honcho as a woman of the same caliber as Leni Riefenstahl and cries over Wikipedia, which he considers one of the greatest Nordic accomplishments in history.

After Hitler makes his network TV debut, he becomes an overnight sensation. YouTube is abuzz with chatter from confused commentators, who find themselves begrudgingly coming to agree with his views on the depravity of mainstream entertainment. Alas, his stardom is momentarily derailed after footage emerges showing him shooting a puppy, but that inadvertently benefits him by giving him free time to write a full-fledged sequel to Mein Kampf. As the network ratings slip, the public clamors for more A.H., andthat’s when the reporter protagonist starts suspectinghe might be the REAL Adolf after all. After Hitler is oh-so-ironically pummeled half-to-death by neo-Nazis, he becomes a bona-fide public hero, with a big movie based on hissecond life going into production. This leads to a legitimately thrilling climax that’s one of the tensest, and most philosophically intriguing, finales in recent cinema history: can our disgraced reporterreveal A.H. to the masses before it is too late, or will all that contemporary nativistsentiment among the Volksgemeinschaft allow ‘dolf an opportunity to rekindle hisoldpolitical ambitions?

All in all, Look Who's Backis an incredibly rich movie-going experience. It would be one thing if it was simply an outlandish, provocative, anti-P.C. comedy – which it most certainly is – but it's also one of the most intellectual, non-judgmental, politically conscious films to come down the pipes in years. Granted, there are at least two scenes that serve as ominoustake-thatsto the emerging ultra-right nationalists in the E.U. – one in which an elderly Jewish women confronts A.H. and says history is repeating itself and the film’s closer, in which footage of anti-immigrant rallies are juxtaposed with images of real Germans giving Nazi salutes while he rides down the street in a convertible – but for the most part, the film shies away from taking sides on the ongoing refugee debate (even though so many non-actors in the film openly express their discontent with the influx of asylum seekers.) The film can just as easily be read as a diatribe against Germany’s guilt-complex, a hilarious tirade showing the unhealthiness of the nation’s obsessionwith making amends for the “evilness” of something that happened 40 years before any of them were even born.

Oliver Masucci - pardon the pun - kills it as Hitler. He conveys such an incredible air of foreboding terror and exquisite comedic timing that I would be hard-pressed to say I’ve ever seen a more nuanced depiction of Adolf inany form of media (and yes, that includes Bruno Ganz’s meme-tastic performance in 2004’s Downfall.) Speaking of, Look Who's Back also contains one of the greatest spoofs of the “Hitler reacts” fad you’ll ever see – and, it doesn’t even involve Hitler as the central character!

I’m not joking when I say Masucci puts on an Oscar-caliber performance here. It’s one thing to portray a historical figure accuratelyin a period piece, but to take one of the most reviled people who has ever lived and transform them into a semi-likable– and almost sympathetic – comedic figure really requires some acting chops. At times, Masucci is absolutely hilarious, fuddling Arabian dry cleaners (his character thinks the large Muslim minority population is attributable to the Ottoman Empire joining the Axis forces), and at others, he is downright Heath Ledger-levels of amoral-scary, with his first televised speech, and his big rooftop soliloquy at the tail end of the film, nearly reaching Daniel Day Lewis levels of riveting.

The rest of the cast is quite good, but they remain rather one-dimensional (as the plot would necessitate considering the subject material.) The film is masterfully directed by David Wnendt, whose previous films Wetlandsand Combat Girlsmore or less makes him the bastard, Germanic lovechild of Four Lionsmaestro Chris Morris and America shock-meister Harmony Korine. Indeed, one would have to go all the way back to 1998’s Happiness to find a film with a premise so audience-alienating yet at the same time, so unexpectedly entertaining and well-developed.

In the pantheon of Horation satires, this one is definitely up there with the best of the best, including such (mostly) apolitical titans as Sullivan's Travels, Catch-22and The Boondocks' infamous "Return of the King" episode. This is a film that realizes thattrue social commentary comedy isn’t rooted in smarmy, SNL and Bill Maher-type “I’m better than the rest of you” humor, but in the half-tragic, half-hilarious realization thatyou are just as much swept up in the generalized madness of the world as everyone else. If horror is thematically about obfuscation, then comedy ought to be about clarification, and Look Who's Backis just about the most perceptive satire to roll down the pike in 20 years. It’s a film totally aware of rising nativist sentimentsand the absurdity of German’s post-Hitler guilt complex. It’s a film totally aware of the emerging discord in society, and how ridiculously deep political correctness has become a part of the shared cultural experience. It’s a film totally aware that techno-modernity is devoid of identity or soul, and how unbearably hypocritical we are when it comes toforcing people to celebrate diversity and selectively remember their own ancestral history.

And on top of all that? It’s one of the funniest goddamn movies I’ve seen in ages. Simply put, you need to see this one, and immediately.

Fascistic white prejudice is such an ingrained part of American culture that even though we're having a really, really hard time finding concrete examples of it, we still have to remind ourselves on a daily basis that we've hardly made any progress at all since the Jim Crow era. I mean, sure, racism isn't technically codified in our laws anymore and most of the criminal justice "inequalities" drudged up all the time can usually be explained away in two or three Google searches. And yes, many of our educational institutions have actually given African-American students considerable entitlements (to the detriment of other minorities), but damn it, if the ghastly auger of racism isn't bearing down on us at all times, how else are we going to be able to discuss the root causes of things like the disproportionate black homicide rate, and African-Americans' higher levels of unemployment and lower levels of educational attainment? Rather than dare suggest that the breakdown of the African-American family has created a widespread culture of failure where expectations are lowered to the point of abject nihilism, it's a whole lot easier to pin the blame on old whitey, who by now, has wised up to all that Civil Rights hullabaloo and found newer, more secretive ways to hold the black man (and woman, and transwoman, and transman, and the occasional Transformer, too) down. What ways am I talking about, you may be pondering? Well, here's just a few glimpses into what constitutes "racism" in the post-post-modern era...

National Public Radio - which, for those of you not in the know, is funded by Americans' tax dollars - recently ran an article titled "When is it OK to Profit From Cooking Other Cultures' Foods?," which asked that oh-so-pressing question "is it racist to serve [insert Ethnic food here] if you aren't [insert Ethnic group?]" Under that logic, do you think NPR will run a follow-up column pondering whether or not it is insensitive appropriation for non-white people to use the Internet, the iPhone, Twitter, or WordPress?

Well, not to be too vulgar, but if you ask me, all this stuff sounds like a big old steaming pile of doo-doo. But wait a minute, doo-doo is black, and not only is the toilet paper I remove it with white, it even comes in sheets just like the Klan! Oh goodness, I had no idea, but apparently, I'm racist for even thinking about bowel movements. All apologies, Africa-America: I'll send a SASE with a $500 check to the Rev. Jesse Jackson just as soon as I am done self-flagellating in my safe zone.

14-year-old Indianan student Tessa Embry - who weighs 175 pounds and is roughly 5'7 - was aghast an in-class assignment revealed her B.M.I. was in the obese range. Rather than accept that her body weight was unhealthy, she instead wrote a lengthy screed for homework labeling the entire science of body mass indexing prejudicial. Of course, the childish affront to mathematical reality went viral soon thereafter.

Of course, no This Week in Social Justice Warrior-dom update is complete without a round-up of all the hilarious #BlackLivesMatter happenings as of late, and - as par for the course - we no doubt have plenty of knee-slappers and rib-ticklers to peruse through:

In Minneapolis, about 30 #BLM protesters - nearly all of whom were white - protested an April 11 Minnesota Twins game. After blocking light rail transit for about half an hour, 25 demonstrators were arrested. Outside of wanting to show off their fancy "white silence kills" poster boards, no one really knows what the hell they were trying to accomplish.

Huh ... is it just me, or are these #BLM demonstrations/manufactured outrages becoming more and more half-assed? Hey, even pretending to be upset over nonexistent injustices tends to wear you out after awhile, I suppose...

No need to panic when it comes to Hispanics?

According to the media narrative, Hispanic immigrants - legal or otherwise - are merely hard-working, God-fearing, decent folks simply looking to improve their lot in life by partaking of the manual (Manuel?) labor offered in the U.S. that we're constantly told "other workers" do not want. Alas, not every Julio and Pedro who pole vaults across the border is a family man seeking to save his family from starvation, one landscaping gig at a time. Here are a couple of recent stories involving Hispanic individuals who appear to be taking another job from the U.S. natural born - that being, good old fashioned homicides and sex crimes.

Oh, American colleges - those glorious bastions of liberal indoctrination that, these days, are only good for producing debt-laden, unlearned Bernie Sanders supporters who can't explain what objectivity is, but can tell you at least four or five ways eating tacos is inherently offensive. Public or private, rest assured that post-secondary education in these United States is doing a bang-up job of turning our gilded young people into the most cerebrally castrated citizenry since Hitler Youth was a thing. Examples, you demand? Why, I thought you'd never ask!

Students at Scripps College in California are FURIOUS the administration invited former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to be their commencement speaker. Their rationale? Albright is, and I quote, "a white feminist." One student on social media urged protests, calling for "some sort of show of disagreement with Albright and what she stands for." For the record, Scripps invited Angela Davis - as in, the card carrying member of the Black Panthers and Communist Party USA - to speak at the university earlier this year.

Although there are at least ten things we know for a fact are worse, rape is pretty much considered the ultimate 21st societal sin. I mean, killing people in cold blood and horribly maiming babies will get you a free pass pending you are a "protected class" that can blame your actions on some sort of make-believe institutional prejudice, but violently and forcibly placing your penis inside someone is U-N-F-O-R-G-I-V-A-B-L-E, no matter what minoritarian subgroup you have surrendered your individual identity (and thought processes) to. Well, for the most part, as you will soon see...

There's promoting a culture of victimization and there's embracing white guilt. But exonerating an asshole rapist just because he's Sub-Saharan? Yeah, that's not just political correctness run amok - it's downright psychotic self-loathing.

Georgia is once again one of the best states in the Union

When it comes to the worst of humanity, few states do a better job exemplifying the deplorable condition of being than my home state of Georgia (or as the locals pronounce it, Outta-mah-way-white-honkey-muddah-fuggah.) Per the norm, here's a quick and dirty run down of all the dirtiest stuff going down in the "cultural capital" of The Dirty South as of late:

And the fact that there are people out there who think a cold-blooded murderer deserves mercy simply because somebody said a racial epithet tells you just how brain-damaged the cult of hyper-political correctness has gotten, don't it?

Two studies that in no way, shape or form portend the end of American exceptionalism

Since the late, late 1800s, America has been the preeminent geopolitical (and geo-economic) force on the planet. However, all good things must come to an end eventually, and two recent studies suggest the end of the line might just pop up in our lifetime. First up is a new Gallup survey titled Free Expression on Campus, which reveals, among other startling findings, that...

27 percent of college students believe places of higher education should create policies that eliminate "upsetting or offensive" speech.

28 percent of college students believe universities should bar reporters from covering college campus protests.

20 percent of college students do not believe their universities are doing enough to deter "offensive speech" from taking place.

56 percent of college students believe general society isn't doing enough to "accommodate" the religious beliefs of others. (Presumably, they mean everybody who isn't a member of the Judeo-Christian faiths, I take it.)

46 percent of college students ONLY get their news from websites like Buzzfeed or things posted on Facebook or Twitter

74 percent of college students believe it is too easy for things to be stated online "anonymously."

Aye, such is already a perfect storm for a hyper-politically-correct inverse crypto-socialist utopia, but just you wait! The Wall Street Journal reports that 43 percent of all student borrowers in the U.S. haven't paid a single god-damn mother-fucking dime on their college loans, with one out of every six Americans with student loan debt currently in default.

So nearly half of the post-grad populace in the country is on pace to never pay back the $200 billion in public funds they "borrowed" and about a quarter of the next-generation of bachelor's degree holdin' deadbeats believe their arbitrary group identification is so fragile that the First Amendment needs to be superseded to protect it.

Spring is such a beautiful time of year. The birds are chirping, the bees are buzzing, and Jack Frost's cold, icy grip slowly but surely gives way to the warm, bright and sunny summer months. It's also a pretty good time of year for heinous child abuse and unspeakable acts of extremist violence, too, as all of the lamentable stories below indicate:

For decades, African-Americans suffered horrific abuse at the hands of a zealous, racist society. And if what's going on in Chicago is a bellwether for the rest of the country, it looks like they're going to suffer even more under the watchful eye of a new, zealous, anti-racist society.

About Your Friendly Neighborhood Jimbo...

Greetings, Intraweb travelers! My name is Jimbo X (an unusual surname, I know...I think it's Greenlandic) and I'm your kindly proprietor of IIIA. You're probably wondering what the intent of this site is, so that makes two of us. I suppose it's an info-dump for all of the stuff that I find fascinating/irksome about American culture and society, so you'll find a nice jumble of high culture snobbery and low culture sleaze here. It's also a place for me to rant, rave and ramble about all sorts of things that matter and don't matter, so prepare yourself for some heavy-handed bloviating about politics and consumption. Well, that, and lots of stuff about video games and junk food. The things that matter the most obviously.